The Catholic Church has had a presence outside the clinic for more than a decade, with volunteers handing out pamphlets and imploring patients to rethink their decision to abort, or simply praying silently. The evangelical presence here, under the auspices of Speak for the Unborn, has swelled in recent months, as leadership has encouraged local churches to make clinic activism a scheduled event. These activists in their yellow vests man the corners and parking lot entrances in small groups, searching for patients to follow back to the clinic, pleading with them to reconsider and offering them financial assistance, adoption advice and an invitation to their churches; clinic escorts call these protesters “chasers.” For their part, Kentucky Mountain Bible College students, predominately missionaries-in-training, come by bus with their loud chants and gruesome posters displaying aborted fetuses once a month.

All of these groups pulled out the stops for the pre-Mother’s Day effort. Joining them was a street preacher from the newly formed Louisville chapter of the extreme anti-abortion group Abolish Human Abortion, which believes abortion must not only become illegal but that the pregnant person, not just the abortion provider, should be charged with crimes if it is.To AHA, committing one’s life to Christ is the only way that abortion will ever be ended, and the conversion of a soul is as important of a goal as the “saving” of a potential human life. With a microphone hooked to his belt the preacher stood on a stepstool 20 feet from the waiting room window. From there he bellowed his sermons of sin and redemption, which could be heard by patients inside.

Meanwhile, just outside the clinic’s front door stood an African-American woman, who from 7 until 8:30 a.m. kept up a rapid-fire speech ranging from the alleged dangers of abortion to how much Jesus loves the people in the clinic to how the doctors don’t care about them. At one point she warned that an abortion could be unsuccessful and a woman could end up caring for a disabled baby. Or worse. “You may not make it out of there alive,” she shouted at the waiting-room window. “I know that’s harsh, but that’s the facts.”

While the prayer warriors took over most of the block to the right of the clinic, escorts, who were also on hand in unusually large numbers on that day, lined the sidewalk up the left. By arriving before 6 a.m., they had taken many of the parking spots in front of the clinic and organized themselves to vacate spaces to accommodate patients, who they guided through the gauntlet of protesters. The plan to expedite drop-off and minimize contact with protesters was highly successful: Some patients were dropped directly in front of the clinic, which allowed escorts to form a human wall to keep protesters behind them all the way to the clinic door.

“It reminds me a little of how we used to have to crowd-surf patients over the antis’ heads and to the door at my old clinic in D.C. before the FACE Act,” said Natalie, an Indiana clinic escort, referring to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) law passed in 1994 that made blocking an abortion clinic entrance a federal crime.

The tactic caused some obvious frustration among abortion opponents. Some tried to pop up and shout to patients over the escorts. One yellow-vested “chaser” positioned by the door tried to snake his arm over an escort, brochure in hand, as the patient was already past the property line.

The drama surged each time a car pulled into a parking spot and was surrounded immediately by a group of six students from Kentucky Mountain Bible College, who would place their signs —“Jesus Saves,” “Babies are Murdered Here”—or gruesome pictures directly in front of the windows or windshields while the patient and companion attempt to exit the vehicle.

In between the arrival of patients, some protesters spent time talking to, and at, the escorts.

“You have a lot of bloodlust,” one protester informed the line of escorts at the front door. “After this, are you going to go get you a puppy? Kick it, beat it, gut it? Encourage it. Encourage that bloodlust.” He paused, walked over to another group and added, “What if I brought you an opossum the next time. Would you want to stamp its head?”